Dark Thoughts

There is a splinter theme of freezing in my life right at the moment. It's not all encompassing, but there are a few things that have frozen, or will freeze in the near future.

Firstly lets examine the past.

In my last post I talked of my new toy. The KSP8. Well it sounds fantastic. The effects are crystal clear and there is soooooo much power in it. I never thought I could get to the point with effects where I've put enough on and have capacity to spare, but the KSP8 has proven me wrong. What I've noticed with quality units like this, is that you actually end up using less effects because the quality is so high that you don't need to add more effects to it to clean up artefacts of a previous effect.

Reverbs are a good example. With cheaper units, there is a certain shine to the top end that is missing, requiring some enhancement to bring back that spacious presence, but on units such as Lexicons and the KSP8, the top end is so beautifully defined that further processing is often unnecessary.

Anyway, while the unit does sound beautiful, the configuration of mLAN is still proving to be a bit of an enigma, and has caused freezes on my computer as I'm attempting to get it properly configured (the start of the theme).

As a bit of history for the unitiated, mLAN is a new protocol developed largely by Yamaha that aims to replace the spaghetti of cables currently used to connect studio gear. A single mLAN cable can carry both audio and MIDI bidirectionally as well as allowing networking and data transfers at speeds of up to 800 MB/s. The mLAN protocol layer sits on top of the IEEE 1394 Firewire layer and communicates with a dedicated chip in the hardware unit. One of the beauty's of firewire is that once you have configured the connections on your computer you can unplug the computer, and everything will remember what it was connected to, both MIDI and Audio. You can also change your configuration completely and save those settings.

The patching capabilities are impressive as are the flexibility of the entire protocol. Hardware can be daisy chained in a similar way to computer networks, and each unit could theoretically be fully connected bidirectionally for control and data with a single cable.

The technology itself is still quite young with only a handful of devices having been developed to date. The driver software still chews up quite a bit of processor overhead on my system, though apparently that has improved, and will continue to improve as it becomes more integrated into computer systems.

Anyway, it looks very promising and will be a nice standard if more people start to integrate it into their systems, but there are some teething problems with it at the moment, which I am fumbling my way through.

The theme of freezing continues with my impending trip to Mongolia. Temperatures as low as -30C will necessitate some serious cloting. I'm going shopping this afternoon with my workmate, who is travelling with me to Mongolia.

The suggested list of clothes reads as follows.

• Down Jacket (not pertex)
  
• Boffin Island Fleece Jacket
  
• Windstopper Gloves
  
• Fleece Beanie
  
• Fleace Scarf or Fleece Neck Windstopper
  
• 2 Pairs Super Fleece Socks
  
• 2 thermal core/polypro thermal tops
  
• 2 thermal core/polypro termal bottoms
  
• 1 pair radial fleece pants or trail fleece pants
  
• Polypropylene Balaclava
  

Hopefully that will keep me warm.

I'm going to miss Jodie tho while I'm there. I think it would be much easier to stay warm if I could snuggle.

Anyway, I've got a paper that needs writing for a conference at the end of november and some shares to sell, so until next time...